Crowley Edwards .com

I’ve decided to go ahead with the TotD shared universe because it won’t leave me alone. I still need to nut out a few things and sort of my time management to get it done but I have started putting some things together.

It will launch with a call for submissions for an anthology and go from there. More info soon.

Background (this is all “reported” with very little background research or research of any kind on my part): Paranormal Activity was made by Oren Peli – direct, write, edit etc, who reportedly sold the film to Paramount Studios to distribute with Dreamworks having an unneeded fiddle along the way. They reportedly paid around three hundred thousand to do so and the film has grossed over one hundred million in the US alone. I think you can usually add the same number for international gross, so let’s say a total of one hundred and fifty million to two hundred million and I think that would still be under the mark. The film cost between $11000 and $15000 to make. This = lots and lots of profit. But there is advertising and other miscellaneous expenses which at the far high end would be up to twenty five million. This still equals lots and lots of profit and the film is touted as the highest return on investment. Great.

It is also reported that the actors Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, both of which are rarely off screen or behind camera didn’t know Oren before doing the film and actually responded to an ad on Craig’s List. They were reportedly paid $500 each and didn’t get a script but were told what to do and how to behave. Meaning they improvised their lines.

Now this doesn’t appear to be an issue because it seems Oren is probably a nice guy, but that could be it for them. They co-wrote and stared in a film that made two hundred million dollars and made $500 each and no writing credits. Now the writing credits (for which they do deserve) would be the domain of the WGA, of which they are probably not members so they may be screwed there and I don’t think has been rectified. On the money front they probably screwed themselves.

I don’t doubt Oren put in 1000% more effort into getting this film done and they had the privilege of getting starring roles in a feature that could have ended its life on YouTube, but you always have to prepare for the possibility of something happening with what you are doing. I don’t know the story and it’s reported that they are negotiating for a piece of the pie they rightly deserve – I have seen bad actors kill good films and they did a great job – and as there isn’t a whole thing about it, I suspect that Oren is doing the right thing.

This brings me somewhere near my point. If they had negotiated in a point system, there wouldn’t be any issue now. Say the net profits are divided by one hundred thousand points, there is no reason that they couldn’t have gotten a few thousand each at the outset plus the $1.50 an hour they were already paid.

Sure they did something akin, but far rarer than winning the lottery, but they should have known what they were doing. This also goes for Oren, it’s far harder to give away money that you already have than money you expect not to make.

Everyone working in the creative fields should have at least a general understanding of the laws pertaining to their industry, intellectual property, copyright and what could happen if you accidently make shit loads of money.

There’s more but I’m drunk. Great film by the way.

I’ve recently been listening to Tor.com’s Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast. I’ve only listened to the first few episodes (of 13 at the time of writing) and although there is still much to be desired, I think this is a great concept with great content and is something that has been needed in the area. I know there are other podcasts on similar subjects but from my limited exposure, I haven’t found anything of this caliber. So far in each episode, they have had a feature interview, talk about the subject and a bit of a focused ramble. I think part of the problem with the show is all of the above. The interviewees have been okay to great but the hosts aren’t very good at interviewing (yet). Where they should be drawing out the interviewee, they have held back and where they should have backed off, they have interrupted with an irrelevant question (I’m thinking of P.W. Singer in episode 3). I understand that it’s all new and have no doubt they will improve but I think some on the problem at the moment is format. This also covers what’s wrong with the rest of the show. I think it could work really well as more of a round table discussion in a similar way to TWIT. Don’t have an interview as such but bring them on as a guest of the show, ask the questions as they are needed and let the discussion develop from there. Maybe the discussion can also be less focused, letting it go where it wants to go and talk about any current events in the area. Other than these teething issues, I think John and David are doing a great job and hope that the show finds its pace.

I just finished Tomb Raider Underworld. Fun game, although it could possibly be over done if you’ve played any of the previous entries in the series. I haven’t for more than maybe half an hour of the first or second one many many years ago, so this was fairly fresh to me. What really got to me was the sophisticated technology in ancient civilizations, it was something I realized was not often seen outside of video games and put simply, I think it’s great because it fires my imagination. In games it seems to be everywhere and I suspect is conveniently used for puzzles and style / story substance second. The more I think about it, it is probably an almost perfect example of deus ex machina when used in video games.
But now I can’t think of anything I’ve read that really deals with this in that particular time period. Not something like Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones where they are in the  modern era encountering  ancient technology, but something set in the time of an ancient, fictional or real civilization. Forget the relics they are after, I would be far more interested in the stone and wood clockwork that pulls giant statues of gods with Mattel style moving parts out of the ground.
This got me wondering what it’s called and who actually writes in the genre. So looking around, this all officially falls under the steampunk label for anyone that has no interest in steampunk or genrepunk anything. Other people have commented on it  but it really only comes down to labels, agreed or not. I guess the closest that any label comes to it would be clockpunk or probably closer still, mythpunk. For me, the punk suffix doesn’t really work the same way for myth as it does for cyber and steam but I guess the alternative, -tech doesn’t either. Mythtech works to a degree because it is more descriptive than any -punk suffix but I’m unsure if it works as a genre. The most common place for the usage is games, roll playing and video, but I would guess that they would mostly just fall under the Fantasy category. Something I may have to follow up…

I have a piece of  flash fiction called Subject 448 published on Everyday Weirdness.

Go check it out.

I have decided to go ahead with the thoughts from the previous post and put it under the banner of Time of the Dead (anything related to this will now have the tag: Time of the Dead). I already had the domain timeofthedead.com that I was going to use for a different project but I think it works really well with the zombie genre and I think it is perfect for this project.

I have what could be most of the rules material for the universe planned out but I’m thinking it could be a good idea to get some other people on board and nut out the rules as a team. I’ll think about that for a little bit or if you happen to be reading this and think it’s a good idea, give me a shout.

The universe will be going under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, so anyone will be able to make and profit from derivative works while keeping the copyright to their own works, with the condition that they give credit – likely in the form of a link / domain name.

I also have many ideas for the site, notably community features and I’m thinking about ways for people to sell their stories. If only micropayments were viable…

More to come.

Zombies have had somewhat of a resurgence in popular culture in recent years, spurred on mostly by a spate of some quality movies, video games and comics. As yet they have yet to feature in their own television show but news is that they are on their way with the possible adaption of The Walking Dead comic book published through Image Comics. Fiction is somewhat behind in popularity but a couple of successful books are possible forerunners of things to come. Max Brooks with WWZ and The Zombie Survival Guide as well as the novelty Jane Austen Vs Zombies (which I haven’t read and have no intention).

Throughout most of the zombie media, there features differing (sometimes only slightly) worlds and rules and while some of them come close to probable, the audience has to constantly reassess and rediscover the rules of that particular universe, one bite at a time. As someone who likes the genre, this becomes rather annoying and even more annoying are the little thing creators do to differ their world from all of the others and so often in doing so, put in the improbable and/or impossible in the already improbable, retching me out of my already suspended disbelief into the realms of “WTF are you doing?”.

So, how is the problem solved?  I think the problem of the constant reassessment, story to story, could be solved with a set or a couple of sets of open source rules and an open source universe or few. The second problem can be taken care of if the said rules are based on a set of possible (within the improbable) sudo-scientific structures. Example; rather than the oversimplified and mystical rules that Romero used for the Living Dead movies, base the rules on what could potentially happen in our world, meaning, some sort of virus or disease that people have to somehow catch rather than some meteor that comes through the atmosphere and everyone reanimates after they die forever after. So, let’s say we have a virus (we’ll go into the specifics of that later), we need it to cause the Zombie Apocalypse, so we need it to not only spread but spread fast. This isn’t something that’s going to happen if:

1. The virus kills and reanimates straight away.

2. Zombies move slowly.

Think about that last one for a moment. Think you could take out ten slow moving zombies without being bitten? Sure you do, so why wouldn’t everyone else be able to do the same thing?  Yeah it could take a while for people to catch on about head shot thing but you could keep dodging and running until you worked it out. Besides, even your mum probably knows how to kill a zombie, she’s seen at least one of the movies. Plus you think the military would let it past a single town or city block? You could kill ten without breaking a sweat, think about what the government could do. So, what we need is a virus that doesn’t show up straight away so it can spread around the world before it breaks out and if the virus is spread by bites, the original carrier or carriers need to be fast when they turn.

So what we have now is a virus and fast zombies. Now I know fast zombies are not everybody’s favorite type of zombies, most of the traditionalists like the slow, shambling type, myself included, but we need fast zombies to bring about the apocalypse. Sticking to the realm of improbable but possible science, we can say that although the virus makes people dead but slows decomposition, a form of rigor mortis sets in after 24 hours (approximately 12 hours is real life) and they start to slow down, becoming the shambling creatures we love.

Now we have a virus, fast and slow moving zombies and a possible Zombie Apocalypse, all within the realm of improbable but possible science. Now all we need to do is make the virus work for this and for all the ways we traditionally like to destroy their brains.

So, we need our virus to have no visible symptoms for the first 8 or so hours as we need to have enough travel time to spread it. Symptoms can start to kick in around then but they need to look similar to any other virus or infection. Influenza is a good model because it wouldn’t be overtly noticed straight away, plus it bares a resemblance to many other viruses and infections, especially the tropical ones (malaria, dengue etc). We are creating the zombie virus so we need it to ultimately take over the brain in a short period of time and then be able to reanimate the dead. So the first step would be to attack the immune system, making it its own and then go for the central nervous system (essentially the brain and spinal cord), inducing a biochemical and morphological change in the cells, essentially making them “zombie cells”. The virus would then be spread through the saliva with the traditional zombie bite as well as other transfers of bodily fluids (see blood splatter into open wounds and eyes as well as STD’s etc (sorry to the necros out there)).

Now we have the start of a workable virus, fast and slow moving zombies, potential for an apocalypse with the rest of it sitting in the tradition of all we love about zombies, including all the ways that we like to kill them.

With the rest of the rules essentially the same as any other zombie universe, the clarification of the virus and what it does, we have a very workable set of rules. Now would be a good time to place them in a world. So what sort of world can we place them in? I don’t know, how about ours? Yes ours. Exactly the same world that we live in, you know the one where we all know the word “zombie”? What is with the creations were the world is just like ours but with the single exception that no one ever thought about the dead coming back to life: A world just like our own except for a choice few movies, video games and books. Yes it really pisses me off when characters say every word for zombies and often seem like they are trying really really hard to not say the “Z” word. Just the amount of missed opportunities for cool lines alone… Anyway, our world, maybe a short in the future to start the apocalypse (for creative reasons), drop this set of rules in there, and we have a probable improbable zombie universe.

Put it under a Creative Commons license that everyone can share and people can create and profit from their own works while retaining their own copyright and we have a workable shared zombie universe.

Hmmm… Stay tuned.

I figure I should just get started with the posting and worry about setting up house with the blog whenever I get around to it.

I’m a new writer in the sense that I’m about to launch what I have written into the big wide world, although I’m not new to writing. This blog is a means to comunicate to the world (or more likely the person who accidently clicks a stray link and realising it isn’t what they were actually looking for, closes the page tab) about what I’m doing or trying to publish or edit. It’s also likely that I will post stray thoughts and possibly anything that particually interests me at the time. And of cause a little fiction. The post count will vary greatly as there may be spurts and stutters of many to zero posts at any given times. So even if there hasn’t been a post in six months, it’s not dead, I’m not dead, there will be more.

Crowley Edwards

For some obscure and undoubtedly perverse reason you have ended up on this page.

Well, it’s not finished, in fact, it’s only just started. I still need to unpack and do some house cleaning.

And once that’s done you probably wouldn’t want to come back anyway.